Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty Introduction

A. A central aspect of how languages and dialects develop through time is that all of them are replete with features that, in the strict sense, they do not need. This is important to realize not only for the sheer wonder of it, but also because an awareness of it sheds insight on how languages’ structure is determined in part by their history.

B. For example, the have-perfect is not only rare across languages but unnecessary. The perfect merely implies that something that happened in the past is still relevant in the present, and a great many languages leave that semantic shade to context. When Dorn at the end of Chekhov’s The Seagull says, “Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself,” in Russian, it simply translates as “Konstantin Gavrilovich shot himself”—that the event has ongoing implications is quite clear from context.